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Fatemeh Tabassi Mofrad- Ladan Bahrami- Rose Meschi- Golnoush Hosseinian Moghadam-Mahshid Zibaee
'A utopia can be defined as an ideal or perfect place or state, or any visionary system of political or social perfection. In literature, it refers to a detailed description of a nation or commonwealth ordered according to a system which the author proposes as a better way of life than any known to exist, a system that could be instituted if the present one could be cancelled and people could start over.' The word itself was coined by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 book of the same name, (his imaginary perfect island was called Utopia). The roots of the word are from the Greek ou (not) and topos (place), thus meaning “no place” or “nowhere”, although there are also overtones of “good place” from the homonymous Greek prefix eu meaning “good”. In common parlance, it has come to mean an impractical or idealistic scheme for social and political reform, but the original objective of the utopian novel was political, social and philosophical. Over the years, various attempts have been made to establish real-life utopian communities, many of them in the United States. Several experimental communities were set up in the USA in the 1830’s and 1840’s following the doctrines of Charles Fourier. New Harmony was established in Indiana under the leadership of a Scottish industrialist named Robert Owen. The Icarians (followers of Frenchman Etienne Cabet’s philosophies) established settlements in several US states in 1848. The Oneida Community was a utopian commune in Oneida, New York, also begun in 1848. The Shakers, an English Protestant group, built villages in eight states in the 1840’s, as did the Amana colonists in Iowa in the 1850’s and the Hutterites in the Dakotas and Western Canada in the 1870’s. Elsewhere, New Australia was a utopian socialist settlement in Paraguay, and there are, even today, Finnish utopian colonies worldwide, including Sointula in Western Canada and Colonia Finlandesa in Argentina. Arguably, kolkhozes (a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union) and Israeli kibbutzes are utopian communities. http://www.lukemastin.com/utopia/ The term "utopia" originated in the early 1500s as an idea created by Sir Thomas More and refers to a society where perfection and stability have been attained. Throughout history, though, many authors have taken that idea and used its exact opposite as a literary device to motivate their stories. The 'anti-utopias' or 'dystopias' take place in societies where the people live in constant fear and control of their governing body, live meaningless lives and have very little hope for any amount of change to take place. I will now take a brief walkthrough of dystopias throughout the history of English literature. While dystopian literature really didn't come into the mainstream until the 20th century, the 19th also held a few stories of significant importance to the emergence of the genre. One of the most important was a novel written in 1863 by Jules Verne entitled "Paris in the Twentieth Century." It tells the tale of a young man who has graduated college with a degree in literature; however all of the arts in Paris are government-controlled. Without being able to use what he learned in school to make a living for himself he finds he is running out of money and with no place to live. He is freezing to death at the end of the novel and walking the streets of Paris. There are mechanical wonders of all sorts, but nothing that will keep him warm and he becomes more and more delirious. He eventually dies after reflecting on how his society's lack of the arts ultimately led to the death of many innocent people. This dystopian epic paints the picture of a world without art and warns that it is a cold and mechanized future. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1989412/the_history_of_dystopian_literature.html